Write Today; Monetize Tomorrow!

A blog post by Jim Connolly inspired me to write this very blog post. In that blog post he mentioned about a best selling Kickstarter book written by the awesomest Seth Godin. When people said it took Seth 3 hours to write that book Seth said it took him around 8 years.

Yes!

That’s how long it took him, writing blog posts almost every day, to build a big enough community to reach his Kickstarter target in 3 hours.

You know what? It applies to blogging as well.

I have noticed a gazillion “How To Start A Blog In 5 Minutes” videos and tutorials. But the reality is that it doesn’t work that way. You know Why? They’re all basically about how to buy a domain name (i.e, your own .com address like minterest.com), web hosting plan (i.e, your own web server space where you can upload files), and install blogging software (WordPress or similar software).

Yes, that’s all you can do in 5 minutes and it’s so far away from a perfect blog as there are a lot of other things that you must know and should do.

And if you read somewhere that blogging is easy then that’s not really true. Blogging is simple but not easy. It takes time, patience, some money, and a lot of effort and learning to get going. Yes, it’s possible to create a new WordPress blog and publish your first article in less than 10 minutes but it will probably look like this and not like this.

Your First 365 Posts Are The Worst Blog Posts Ever

Wondering about 365? Well, it’s just a number assuming that you published one blog post everyday in the first year. I started Minterest back in 2007 and later in 2011 I had around 365 blog posts that was sending me around 300 unique visits a day. But what’s interesting to me was few evergreen posts were sending most of the traffic. So then I decided to write in-depth content covering almost all aspects of the topic. And in less than 10 months I increased the traffic by 5 times. The search traffic zoomed to 1,500+ visits a day.

Then there was a Google penalty (damn Google Panda!) and I decided to clean my archived blog posts. Yes, there were low quality content, thin content, and some duplicate content as well. I deleted every single post that were outdated, news topic, or something that I didn’t like and ended up with just 130 blog posts or so from 500+. Again, even after deletion the traffic was not affected in anyway and it obviously means that all the deleted blog posts were sending nearly zero traffic.

You want to become a good blogger? Then read and write a lot. Yes, A LOTTT. It’s practice that makes us perfect.

Closing Thoughts

You don’t start a blog to make money. I would say don’t even think about it.

Just focus on writing and writing only. Because, when you have the content it will naturally attract traffic (though little promotion won’t hurt) and when you have the traffic then there’s a way to monetize it and you can do it any day.

And no, you don’t really need a million visits to make money from your blog. In fact, back in 2007-08 when I had less than 100 visits a day I monetized a niche blog perfectly and was able to generate $1,000s a month in affiliate income.

Happy Blogging! :)

First Published: July 30, 2014; Last Updated: Monday, August 27, 2018.

ABOUT MAHESH (@maheshone)

Hey there, I’m Mahesh (@maheshone). I started learning and doing and experimenting web 2.0 stuff back in 2004 and eventually became a full-time computer nerd after graduation. Minterest is a digital marketing and technology journal that I founded in 2007 to feed my super curiosity (oh yeah, I’m a solo-blogger). I write about tech, marketing, and everything in between that excites me. And I love to work with small businesses to help them get the most out of the web. Outside of that, I'm equally passionate about the financial markets and I also spend a lot of time doing random things (see random facts about me). Say hi: @maheshone. Read More »